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© RICK WILKING/Reuters/Corbis
STATES MAKE CHANGES
TO GET OUT THE
by Mary Branham
GETTING OUT THE VOTE Above, Denver election worker Constance Rolon waited for voters to deposit their ballots at the Denver Elections Division headquarters in 2012. At right, college student Cortney Ratashak, 18, of Littleton, Colo., talked over paperwork with an electoral official before voting in the general election at a polling station serving the local student population on the campus of the University of Colorado, in Boulder, Colo. The state made changes in 2013 that supporters believe will help the state maintain high voter turnout.
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CAPITOL IDEAS | SEPT/OCT 2014
Colorado election officials were regularly seeing 70, sometimes 80, percent of voters casting their ballots by mail. That’s because the state offered the ability to vote as a permanent absentee. “Most of our voters were voting that way anyway,” said Donetta Davidson, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association. To do so, however, voters had to apply for permanent absentee status. That changed with a 2013 law that standardized the vote-by-mail process. Now, everyone in the state receives
a ballot by mail that they can cast by either mailing it back or taking it to a voter service center. Those centers also have voting machines for people who want to cast their ballots in person. “When we were thinking about the legislation, we took what the voters liked and built upon that, but also gave the choice to the other people. If you want to go to the polling site, we’re not going to take that away from you,” Davidson said. Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, lauded the efforts made in
